Sassure and Structuralism

"Signs function not through their intrinsic value but through their relative position."


Saussure having said that really seems to me to be making the point that it all depends on what surrounds the big picture. Signs function in all of this not by some deep value that might have but by their positioning and place in reference to other things. I am not exactly sure if that makes sense to anyone who actually know what they are talking about but that is the main idea I think I was able to derive from that. I really think that this quote does an excellent job at summarizing the jumbled ideas I took away after reading this. That everything with language and in a text is all relational. A single word cannot have a true value unless it is able to be compared to other things. For words to have value Saussure talks about that they need both a "dissimilar thing that can be exchanged", and a," similar thing that can be compared with the thing of which value can be determined". Explaining in those two steps help me understand and think about it all more. It put his ideas in a more accessible to me and put them into a real sense for me.